Are You Wasting Your Calls to Action?

Wondering why you aren’t seeing the results you want from your online marketing materials ? It could be that your calls to action are to blame. But don’t fret: researchers have invested lots of resources in determining how calls to action work—and how we can make them work better for our bottom lines.

Improve Your Calls to Action for More Conversions

When you’re ready to start seeing more click-throughs and conversions on your marketing materials, take the time to implement these strategies for more effective calls to action:

• Identify the purpose of every page. Every page of marketing material you create (whether it’s an email, a landing page, a sales page, or a page on your company website) should have a specific purpose. That purpose might be to get a viewer to buy, to sign up for something, to fill out a form, etc. Once you know what you want a viewer to do, you can direct him or her to do that action with, you guessed it, a call to action.
• Use a call to action on every page. A page without a call to action is a dead end. Know exactly what you want your readers to do, and make it easy for them to do it!
• Put one above the fold. You should always include a call to action in the part of the page that viewers can see without scrolling. Many online readers will not bother scrolling down, so it’s imperative that you call them to action before they click away.
• Dress it up a little. Calls to action should contain a link, but that doesn’t mean you have to use a plain hyperlink. You can make a call to action fancier with a sales button or graphic. In some situations, you can draw attention to your call to action by creating white space around it, making it larger than surrounding text, or putting it in a color that contrasts with the rest of the page.
• Create a sense of urgency. The language of your call to action should go beyond the basic “click here.” By using benefit-driven, active verbs you communicate to your readers why they should go through with the call to action. For example, “sign up for poetry lessons today” could work as a call to action, but “discover your inner poet” speaks more directly to the benefits a person will receive.
• Be crystal clear. You know exactly what you want your readers to do. Do they? If not, it’s time to assess the clarity of your call to action. Make sure that you ask for an action that is specific, that your language is concise, and that if you offer more than one option, you give your readers enough information to determine which one they want.
• Use a call to action in every screen view. No matter where a viewer is on your page, there should be a call to action visible. Make sure you’re repeating your calls to action often enough to reinforce your message but no so often that the page feels spammy.

Mastering the call to action takes some practice, but once you’ve got it down, you can see tremendous results!

What do you wish you’d known about calls to action when you started marketing online?

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